Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, the opposition candidate in the Maldivian presidential elections, has beaten President Abdulla Yameen.
The Election Commission of Maldives on Monday announced the provisional results, with Solih, winning the elections with 134,616 votes, Maldives Foreign Ministry confirmed.
The 54-year-old belongs to the Maldivian Democratic Party and was fielded by the joint opposition as their candidate to take on Yameen, the incumbent president of the archipelago.
“We have won this election with a comfortable majority, I called on President Abdulla Yameen to respect the will of the people and to immediately begin the smooth transition of power,” Al Jazeera quoted Solih, as saying.
Yameen secured 96,132 votes. Official results are scheduled to be announced before 30 September 2018.
Around 263,000 Maldivian voters exercised their franchise in the high-stakes elections on Sunday, keenly watched by the West and countries such as India, the United States and China.
The island nation has been engulfed in a political upheaval over the past few months with Yameen imposing a state of emergency to annul the Supreme Court ruling that quashed the convictions of nine opposition leaders, including Mohamed Nasheed, Maldives’ first democratically-elected president.
